modernisme metalico

 

in Barcelona, in Paris, and in other cities, I am always drawn to overwrought ironwork, decorative and functional, imperially elegant and wildly anachronistic, from the sanctioned designs of master metalsmiths and from the florid imagination of one improbably eccentric architect...

Gaudi, whose astonishing swirly creations elevate a city's architectural heritage to a giddy plenitude of art nouveau flourishes, entwined metallic strands into such fanciful flights, they seem alive and in vigorous flux...

[Palau Guell, Carrer Nou de la Rambla, 3-5, Barcelona]

barri digne

every so often around the Ciutat Vella I am distracted by fluttering black and white banners that dangle off balcony railings and window boxes demanding for the right to a dignified neighbourhood with double exclamation marks...

it is a sidewalk-crack-roots protest to bring attention to the deteriorating state of buildings and streets in some quarters that have missed the seductive grasp of gentrification and must now swallow their pride to hang out their really dirty laundry...

barcelona primitivo

doggy love...robot compatible...sign of the times?

even our pets have embraced machines intimately...are we to take heed of the oddness of animal behavior as a premonition of the earth-quaking seduction of artificial intelligence tapping into the power of LOVE??

[the graffiti in Barcelona rock!]

mies barcelona*

it was a pilgrimage to be sure to a structural icon that expanded the repertoire of the modern movement in architecture to the multi-level versions that now tower and dwarf us the world over...
and this singular low-slung and hyper-precise pavilion representing Germany in the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition would endow the rigorous and romulian Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with almost god-like status to all the young architects who have marched on ever since...

[the Barcelona chair was a little tattered with an errant thread trailing out of its tufted stitching - I was tempted to tuck it back into the seam!
and if one stares long enough at the marble walls, monstrous and alien creatures will emerge in hallucinagenic flashes!]


[the Pavello Mies van der Rohe was faithfully reconstructed on its original site in the Parc de Montjuic and opened to the public in 1986, the original having been dismantled after the exhibition]

*more images of this pavilion are posted on my ZYGOSPHERE

futbol demigods

on a hilly neighbourhood above Barcelona, we come upon a school football field where the young local soccer stars aspire to divinate their quick-footwork and power-kicks...
the three tiled plaques mounted on an entrance wall to the field commemorate the long veneration of their all-encompassing national sport at the most elemental level...

[this was the closest I got to touching the catalonian futbol gods on the streets of Barcelona...]

tour agbar

from medieval quarters, we ride through wide boulevards to the Plaça de les Glories Catalanes where rises Barcelona's sexiest landmark, on par with the Tour Eiffel in glorifying a city skyline...
this 21st century tower, designed by a french architect no less, soars like a supersonic jetnose into the heavens and sparking chromatic beacons into the nightsky...ever beckoning to the old iron lady not so far away...

[Torre Agbar, by Jean Nouvel with b720 Arquitectos, 2005]

sur le dos

our flight was delayed for hours because the air traffic controllers at CDG were on strike/at rest and KLM couldn't get permission to fly over french air space...
when we finally flew over Paris, a blanket patch of fairy lights, and landed in Barcelona, we felt like we had made the journey by horseback for days over the snowy Pyrenees and crossing devout pilgrims' paths...
we enter the Barri Gotic, darker and more cloaked atmospheric than the Marais, and found this signage welcoming weary horsepowered wanderers...

[Plaça de Sant Josep Oriol, Barri Gotic]

back from barcelona*

barcelona could be the new paris for me as I have fallen hard for its sensuous insouciance, its cool unconcern for critical couthness, its autonomous axis of catalonian charisma...
all such curvaceous and naturalistic gaudian phantasmagoria swerves into my spatial consciousness floating through some divine streaming light god-fish chamber...and this was only the hallway to the laundry room!

[Casa Batllo, Antoni Gaudi, 1904-06, Barcelona]

*if I may piggy-back barcelona primitivo onto paris primitif for a little while...

leave ajar

I am stepping out on Paris for a little while and opening an enigmatic spanish red door to Barcelona...
so postings here will have to wait until I am back from my catalonian adventures, hopefully with some wildly tantalizing and freshly plucked images from a city that is stirring up a frothy zarzuela of lightness and zest!

[a door on rue du Pont Louis-Philippe, 4e Arr.]

continuum...

there is a tree in Paris that is a testament to the tarrying nexus of time, to the soffit spectrum of survival spiralling through hundreds of millions of years...
the end of another year has me thinking of this singular tree, as I had once watched its leaves radiate a glowing yellow before spinning wordlessly down to the ground...
I picked up a few of these gilded leaves so perfectly bifurcated and so strangely primordial, their cell structure interlaced with mysterious knowledge from so long ago when the world had no human eyes, no human touch...
China has since claimed it as her national tree, but I claim it as poetic justice that it may just keep going on long after countries and people have dissolved away like so many new year's resolutions!

"Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten
Meinem Garten anvertraut,
Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,
Wie's den Wissenden erbaut."*

[*first verse of "Gingo Biloba" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815]
[this particular gingko biloba specimen flourishes in the park beside the Petit Palais]

Je vous souhaite de joyeuses fêtes ainsi qu'une belle et sage année 2010!

paris-noel

meilleurs voeux!
...l'amour...la paix...la merveille...

peace on earth...

goodwill to all men...
"J'étends les bras. Mes mains caressent l'horizon doux et souple..."

"La terre je la vois, la terre je l'entends, la terre est sous mes yeux et vit dans mon oreille.
Rythmique et musicale, elle est encor plus belle!
Ses bleus étages descendent, remontent, prennent un temps.

"Laisse penser tes sens, homme, et tu es ton Dieux."

[french lines excerpted from "La Vision Harmonieuse de la Terre" by Paul FORT, (crowned Prince of Poets by Verlaine), 1872-1960...his famous poem "La Ronde" is about world friendship]

paris-mutuel

it is always hard to say goodbye to a space, an era, an entity that has been so physically encompassing, so emotionally enriching, so gloriously uplifting...but as one volume empties, another fills up, so one must make the leap, the graceful entrechat from the one to the other, to a newly shimmering pas de deux, and to a sparkling fresh territorial gambit...

[in an empty room with muted christmas colours in the Petit Palais, 8e Arr]

au premier

it is easy to imagine delicate things gliding up these wooden stairs to more private tables where the food is neglected and hands are surreptitiously preoccupied with caressing other warmer parts... and no, be they not be palm pilots, sourberries nor vibrating mobiles, but soft and scented, smooth and responsive, and taking a long time to come down those narrow stairs again...

[meandering down the rue du Pont Louis-Philippe towards the silently flowing Seine...]

au deuxième

lurid carminite stairs swirl up a cherry-popsicle space...inflated beach balls float in cartoon suspension...
Dr. Z slides down the tangerine banister into a pristine Miesian world of prize-winning models of architectural wonders while I am sucked like Alice in W-land into this glowering vertical tunnel of erubescent saturation...

[Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, 16e Arr.]

au troisième

drifting through compliant rooms hung with arrested moments in time and place, compelling illusions of captured light and shadows, the ephemeral wisps of hazy played-out lives, I could not climb up the red sphinx steps any further to the smoky trompe-l'oeil, to a ghostly dimension merging what can be seen with what is not really there...as mysterious as the aurora borealis of interior complicity...

[Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, 5/7 rue de Fourcy, 4e Arr.]

la dinde timide

MERCI pour le bonheur din-donner

poor plumped-up turkey pretending to be a voluptuous lamp to avoid being served up as the preeminent plat du jour...
not being the most alluring french delicacy, she is lucky to be in an enlightened city where she can be just a silly goose and not be too enthusiastically devoured in gratuitous gustatorial appreciation...

[somewhere in the merry Marais]

enrue-banner

a narrow and ancient passageway of artisans with signage almost as large as their ateliers' frontage to advertise their really-made-in-france specialities... and a struggling determination to rebuke the products of cheap labour costs from the other side of the world [that have irreversibly and all too quickly infiltrated the high-gloss emporia of euro-consumerism]

[somewhere in the still industrious 12e Arr.]

rejectamenta

the late fall sunlight slants timidly onto a desolate and shuttered-shut streetscape spotting an unassuming grouping of artless dada-debris tossed out from a nearby galerie d'art...
even such unsculptural outcasts, such non-conceptual decontructivism, such free-form-following-functional-fusion concrete-clutter can still manifest a somewhat compelling synthesism of neocubistic "art brut" coalescence...
[sometimes my ironic art-speak gets the better of me!]

[Rue Pierre Gourdault, 13e Arr.; Monsieur Gourdault [1880-1915] was a french painter who had lived in the vicinity but lost his life in the first world war]

l'énigme du propylée

in a shadowless De Chirico meta-architectural dreamscape, the Rotonde de La Villette [19e Arr.] looms stolidly in pseudo-palladian decorum as one of the tollhouses of the Wall of the Farmers General by the Bassin de La Villette...
I ride in slow ambiguous circles around this squat brooding "propyleaum" [Ledoux's term] that had once collected duties from goods entering an 18th century Paris, musing all the while what its 21st century incarnation will be...

"a la fin tu est las de ce monde ancien...
tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquité grecque et romaine...
et tu observes au lieu d'écrire ton conte en prose...
et tu recules aussi dans ta vie lentement...
adieu, adieu...soleil cou coupé"*

*selected lines from the long surrealistic "ZONE" by Guillaume Apollinaire [1880-1918], who was much influenced by the enigmatic work of Italian-Greek painter Giorgio De Chirico [1888-1978]

[Place de Stalingrad; Rotonde de La Villette was designed by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 1786-87]